CrowdStrike reveals cause of major IT outage
CrowdStrike outage affected airlines, emergency services, banks, other businesses
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CrowdStrike on Wednesday released a preliminary report blaming a bug in its test software for the global outage that derailed airline operations and knocked banks, hospitals and other businesses offline.
The Austin, Texas-based cybersecurity tech company said Friday's incident started after it released a content configuration update for the Windows sensor to detect new potential threats.
CrowdStrike said this is part of regular operations of its Falcon platform. However, in this instance, the "problematic Rapid Response Content configuration update resulted in a Windows system crash," the company said.
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The company said it delivers security content configuration updates to its sensors in two ways. One is through Rapid Response Content, which "is designed to respond to the changing threat landscape at operational speed."
United Airlines employees wait by a departures monitor in Newark, New Jersey, displaying a blue error screen after United and other airlines grounded flights due to a worldwide tech outage caused by an update to CrowdStrike's "Falcon Sensor" software (Reuters/Bing Guan / Reuters)
The company said it will be detailing its full investigation in a forthcoming Root Cause Analysis that will be released publicly.
Windows hosts running sensor version 7.11 and above that were online early Friday morning were affected. Mac and Linux hosts were not, according to CrowdStrike.
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Almost immediately after the outage, CEO George Kurtz said in a post on X that it was "not a security incident of cyberattack."
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Kurtz also noted that the issue had already been identified and isolated and that a fix had been deployed.
He also noted that CrowdStrike was operating normally.